Tuesday, April 14, 2015

I think of Anne Tkach



Anne Tkach
By Dana Smith


I think of Anne Tkach


I have a favorite Anne Tkach memory.

The setting: Fred Frictions’s kitchen, adjacent to Frederick’s Music Lounge in its heyday. The time: somewhere in the middle of the afterparty that never ended while Fred Jr. was running the Lounge. We were drinking, smoking, and passing the guitar, natually. I know Roy Kasten was there, because we locked eyes in joyous amazement when the simple chords Anne was strumming turned into a song that Roy wrote with Michael Friedman, “Everything You Love Will Be Carried Away.”

Joy and amazement: not uncommon experiences, when Anne Tkach was playing music.

The specialness of this particular musical experience requires a little explanation, since most people, unfortunately, don’t know who Michael Friedman is or the kinds of songs he writes.

Roy and I went to graduate school in literature at Washington University with Michael. He was an obsessive fan of poetry and songwriting who suddenly started writing songs, frequently with Roy’s assistance on guitar. The typical Michael Friedman song is very long, intensely personal, allusive in complex ways, and for those reasons difficult to learn and to sing.

There was a time when Roy and I were the only fans of Michael’s songs. Anne and other musicians began to hear his songs through the Guitar Circle, a song-swap that we started at Michael’s instigation when he still lived in St. Louis and wanted to encourage his little brother, who was passing through town at a tough time, to focus on his own songwriting.

Through the Guitar Circle, some of Michael’s favorite musicians and songwriters – Anne, Fred, Bob Reuter, Mark Stephens, Sunyatta, Adam Reichman, John Wendland – became fans of his songwriting. Roy drew upon this incredibly deep pool of talent when he produced two records for Michael, “Stories I Have Stolen” and “Cool of the Coming Dark.” Anne played bass on three songs on “Cool of the Coming Dark,” including “Everything You Love Will Be Carried Away.”

She played those bass lines as tastfully as can be imagined, though they were anything but hard for her (or anyone) to learn. Like many of the best singer-songwriters, Michael and Roy go in for the three-chord, two-part songs. But learning a Michael Friedman lyric poses a real challenge for anyone. “Everything You Love” has five long stanzas with absolutely no predictable rhymes or familiar lines, unless you happen to have read every book and heard every record in Michael’s extensive collections.

As Anne broke into the first verse – it’s about Bob Dylan accepting an Oscar on TV, though typically for a Michael Friedman lyric, Dylan is only alluded to, never named – sitting around Fred’s kitchen table, I could see that Roy had no idea she had been learning their song on anything other than bass. It is, needless to say, the highest tribute a musician can pay to a songwriter, to learn one of their songs. Anne was a musician we admired as much as any musician in town, on Earth. It was an unforgettable tribute.

Anne eventually recorded her version of their song with her band Rough Shop on their record “Far Past the Outskirts,” which I only heard after I learned that Anne had died in a house fire. Anne played in a lot of bands, a lot of really great bands, and they released a lot of records, a lot of really great records. When I started sorting through my collection for records Anne played on, to deal with my grief, I found about 10, and I’m sure that’s less than half of her recorded output. Even these 10 records – with the bands Nadine, Bad Folk, Peck of Dirt, Michael Friedman, Ransom Note, Rough Shop and Magic City – would make for a musical career that would make anyone proud.

And that is even with a career, with a life, cut tragically short, when Anne was at the height of her creative powers as a musician and just starting to emerge fully as a songwriter and a singer. I am in awe at her accomplishment, and unspeakably saddened at her sudden loss.

I have a few more personal thoughts about Anne.

She was an incredibly supportive friend. Anne must have attended every event our arts organization Poetry Scores produced. I have many memories of her strolling into an event – in recent years, accompanied by the love of her life, Adam Hesed – and making an effort to connect with everyone before she moved onto the next friend’s gig. Our events are collaborative, so she could have been supporting any of a dozen friends, or all of us. Hundreds of St. Louis artists would say that Anne was there for them, again and again.

I must say she also handles a band break-up as skillfully as I can imagine that being done. She briefly played in a version of my band, Three Fried Men, after Robert Goetz invited her in on drums (another instrument she mastered). As dozens of musicians would tell you, she was a pleasure to play with, learning songs without apparent effort, knowing what to play without being told, having fun in the process. Robert and I had a falling out after only a few band rehearsals, unfortunately, and I lost Anne in the split. I don’t remember how she told me she’d rather play music with Robert than with me – my memory sparing my ego, perhaps – but I do remember it left no bad taste whatsoever. My friendship with Anne continued without a hickup.

I am very relieved to say Robert and I later patched things up, and he was the next person, after Roy, whom I called when I heard that Anne was gone. I needed to speak to someone with whom I had shared, however briefly, the experience of playing music with the one and only, the irreplaceable and unforgettable, the immortal Anne Tkach.

Anne’s friends have been seeing a lot of each other since she died. A series of events in the local music and arts scene became tributes to Anne – wakes, in a way – in the week and weekend after we lost her. The way we lost her, in a house fire apparently sparked by a lightning strike, left us all numb and perplexed. The fact that she was sleeping in that house to care for her ill father only made the loss more deeply unjust and inexplicable. We have all been talking about that.

I was talking about that with Robin Allen, a fellow musician, at Dana Smith’s art show on Friday. Dana is also a musician whose band Cloister gigged with Anne’s bands. Everybody at the art show was grieving. I talked to Robin about how the whole lightning storm thing was making it harder for me to grasp her death and come to terms with it.

“In a way,” Robin said, “the way she died, it’s like we all got struck by lightning.”

We were also talking about that the night before, the night of the day we all heard the tragic news. We were drinking and waking Anne at Ryder’s, the bar owned by the love of her life, Adam. The same violent storm system that apparently killed Anne was still blowing through St. Louis. I was sitting near the front door with Robert Goetz, Gina Alvarez and Kevin Belford.

The storm kept blowing the door of the tavern open, and then closed again. Since the door was also being opened and closed by people coming into the tavern, it was a little weird whenever the door opened and closed, but nothing came into the tavern but a little bit of the storm.

I decided that Anne was a part of the storm now, and that Anne kept coming into the tavern, connecting with her friends, and then moving onto another friend’s gig. Whenever a lightning storm comes to St. Louis now, I will think of Anne coming to see us. Whenever I hear her music or see lightning in the St. Louis sky, I will think of Anne Tkach.

– Chris King


***


Storm outside Ryder's tavern
night of Anne's wake
Photo by Kevin Belford




***


Painting of Anne from Dana's blog.

Anne Tkach fronts Rough Shop performing "Everything You Love Will Be Carried Away" by Michael Friedman and Roy Kasten

Thomas Crone remembers Anne in St. Louis Magazine.



Friday, July 4, 2014

Bootblogging #24: Three by The Modifiers


Chris Perry of The Modifiers
 

We made a record for Pops Farrar and used to offer it for sale on the internet. We'd fulfill a few orders a year, always from an Uncle Tupelo or Son Volt diehard who wanted to hear a record by Jay Farrar's father. One guy stood out.

I don't recall exactly how we got buddied up with this guy, Chris Perry of Boston, or why it happened so fast. But right off the bat, we were mailing precious photographs to each other and plotting road trips.

After our first trip to party with Perro (as we call him) at home in Boston, Joe Esser said, "This feels like a sock I have worn a zillion times." Perro and his spouse Esme have been deep in my heart ever since.

So, thanks, Pops -- again.

The first time I met Pops, I told him I wanted to come over to his house and record him singing and playing accordion and concertina. He said, "Why, Chris, don't just talk about it -- do it!" I did it.

Perro is very much like that. Near the end of Pops' life, he was among my closest friends. I often offered to share Pops with people, because it was essential to Pops' nature to share, but not everyone who would have benefitted took me up on the offer. Perro did it.

He and his buddy Mark drove to Belleville from Boston, stayed at Pops' spread and went native in what Pops called "the Belleville rainforest." I am sure that Pops remembered Perro until the very end.

Chris Perry does not push his band on you. But he leads a band, The Modifiers. I like his band.

free mp3s

"I like her (band)"
(Chris Perry)
The Modifiers

"Anonymous"
(Chris Perry)
 The Modifiers
 (c) Chris Perry

"Rootless"
(Chris Perry)
The Modifiers

Songs (c) Chris Perry


Perro

More in this seriesBootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging  #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost
Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos
Bootblogging #22: Five by Bob Reuter
Bootblogging #23: Six by Lydia's Trumpet

Sunday, March 9, 2014

My pawnshop guitar and some fellows from The Cure



Lol Tolhurst and Meghan Gohil

Little story about a pawnshop guitar, an Alvarez acoustic.

I picked it up at the pawn shop on South Grand in St. Louis for $75. I got a lot of songs out of that guitar, and then passed it along. My buddy Meghan Gohil was starting Hollywood Recording Studio, and studio guys love to have guitar options.

Now one of his steady studio gigs is recording Levinhurst, a project led by Meghan's good friend Lol Tolhurst. Lol was a founding member of The Cure, and Levinhurst is Lol's project with his wife, the equally talented Cindy Levinson. Really great stuff.

Michael Dempsey, a friend of Lol's (and a fellow founding member of The Cure), joined Levinhurst recently to record an e.p. at Hollywood Recording Studio. Michael took a picture of my old pawnshop guitar.

My pawnshop guitar at Hollywood Recording Studio
Photo by Michael Dempsey

"If you'll note, the high E string is removed," Meghan pointed out. "Michael asked me to take this off for the recording sessions, so he essentially played it as a five-string guitar. Most five-string players, like Keith Richards and Pete Townshend, typically remove the low E string."

Michael played my old pawnshop Alvarez on their record. Here he is working out a song with Cindy on it.

Michael Dempsey chording my old pawnshop guitar
as he and Cindy Levinson work out a Levinhurst song.
Photo by Meghan Gohil
Hollywood Recording Studio
 

"You can see three amps in the picture," Meghan notes: "the one on the bottom right is an old Sears Silvertone (my first guitar amp, bought out of the catalog for $79)."

The record these folks made with my old pawnshop guitar and Meghan's out-of-the-catalog amp is really terrific! I'd call it shimmering hypno pop. In the first of the three songs on the e.p., "Somewhere Something," the acoustic guitar establishes the arrangement and the texture of the mix. My old acoustic guitar, in Michael Dempsey's hands, is in very good voice. Check out their e.p. on iTunes.

"Somewhere, Nothing is Everything"
Levinhurst

This week and next week, Meghan tells me, they're going to be broadcasting songs from the new e.p. on a show called "The Lopsided World of Jonathan L," an internet radio show that plays on stations based in Athens, Berlin, L.A. and Phoenix. (More on that also at http://jonathanlradio.blogspot.com/.)

I asked Meghan for a video of The Cure back in the day where Lol and Michael are featured. The official video for "10:15 Saturday Night" has good looks at Lol on drums and Michael on bass, as well as of course Robert Smith on vocals/guitar. What a very great band The Cure was when Lol and Michael backed up the very young Robert Smith.




Lol starts "10:15 Saturday Night," with his simple stick on cymbal, and Michael closes it with an intense, unadorned solo bass figure. I really like the thought that the musician's hands that finished off this absolutely perfect piece of post-punk rock by The Cure have now voiced chords on my old pawnshop Alvarez.

 
The back of Meghan's $79 Sears amp
Hollywood Recording Studio
Photo by Michael Dempsey





Sunday, February 23, 2014

Songs from Home: "After the Money from Mama was Gone" by Bob Reuter



Under the band name Three Fried Men, we have been recording songs by St. Louis songwriters of our generation. Next up: "After the Money from Mama was Gone" by the late Bob Reuter, with Fred Friction on lead vocal.

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Free mp3

"After the Money from Mama was Gone"
(Bob Reuter)
Three Fried Men with Fred Friction

Fred Friction: vocals
Nick Barbieri: drums, rhythm acoustic guitar
Mark Buckheit: lap steel guitar
David Melson: bass, acoustic guitar

Recorded by Nick Barbieri and David Melson in St. Louis, MO
Mixed by Meghan Gohil at Hollywood Recording Studio in Los Angeles, CA
Mastered by Elijah "LIJ" Shaw at the Toy Box Studio in East Nashville, TN
Produced by Chris King for Confluence City

NOTE: NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR ALL AGES.

*

"After the Money from Mama was Gone" was recorded by Bob Reuter and his band Kamikaze Cowboy on their record Down in America (2000), produced by Michael Martin at the Broom Factory in St. Louis. A lot of us think that's one of the best records ever made in St. Louis by anybody, so follow that there link to the Kamikaze Bandcamp page.

Bob Reuter's songwriting speaks for itself more eloquently than anyone else could, but in this song I especially savor how Bob dwelled on local detail and picked out place names from his north St. Louis city and county environment, like Bruce Springsteen bravely putting the Jersey shore towns and interstates on the map of American music.

Bob sings,

And the bad kids down there on Hall Street,
burning up engines and wine,
burning like sunstroke, drifting like cowpokes,
bursting in flames up off of the line

and a St. Louis drag racing landmark has been burned forever into public memory. Bob always stayed a sure step ahead of his critics - it was no surprise, when KDHX gave him his own radio show, to discover that he knew everything about American music - and I submit that Bob knew exactly what he was doing right here within the tradition of American story songs, and that is what the cowpokes are doing in the imagery (in addition to supplying a gorgeous internal rhyme): that's Bob tipping the Kamikaze Cowboy hat and whistling across the smoking tip of his gun.

Fred Friction
 
I love to work with Fred Friction as a vocalist, have done so for many years, and thought of him first when I got the itch to record this song. When I called Fred about the idea, he pretty much shouted, "Yes! That has always been one of my favorite of Bob's songs!" Nick Barbieri recorded Fred's vocal in one single take -- this is the kind of song Fred exhales; it's part of him, it is him. When I shared the final mix and master of this recording with Mike Martin, who recorded Bob's original version on Down in America, Mike agreed that Fred was perfect for this song.

We offer the tribute in Bob's memory.

The song was composed and (c) Bob Reuter and is the property of his estate: http://www.cowboyangel.org/. This cover version is intended for free sharing and non-commercial use with full composition credit and (c) reserved by Bob Reuter and estate. Production-quality audio is available for community radio or local compilations, upon request.

*

Previously on Songs from Home
"Midget's" by Chuck Reinhart
"Had to End Sometime" by Bob Reuter
 

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Songs from Home: "Midget's" by Chuck Reinhart

 
Chuck Reinhart
(at Poetry Scores costume review party, in soldier garb)
 
Three Fried Men is recording songs by St. Louis songwriters that have been stuck in my head for half of my life. First we did "Had to End Sometime" by the late Bob Reuter. Next up: "Midget's" by Chuck Reinhart.

I know the song from the Guitar Circle, a sort of hootenanny in the round (without the jamming) that flourished in St. Louis in the late '90s and early oughts, centered around Michael Friedman and Roy Kasten. This song really gets under my skin. I actually wept at one Guitar Circle over the line "Is there any reason to update what your heart holds dear?" which strikes me as the perfectly innocent question to ask about growing up and older.

We are posting this performance with Chuck's permission. I very hesitantly asked him if he wanted to tell any of the actual stories behind the song, assuming there are any. I assume there are because the song sounds so much like my own life. I almost don't want to know what Chuck's actual stories are, though, for fear that learning more about the song would diminish the spell it casts on me.

Chuck is not much of an e-mailer, doesn't seem to have a social media presence. I'm not waiting for his answer about the stories behind the song - it could be a long wait - though I will add his story here if I get anything.

I don't know much about the composer. Chuck and I have been at many Guitar Circles together, but that was all about listening to songs. He acted (extremely effectively) in a Poetry Scores movie, Go South for Animal Index, but those shoots were all hectic business. Kind of the same way I feel about "Midget's," Chuck has a quiet mystery about him I've liked keeping intact. He strikes me as the kind of square-jawed, taciturn, decent, sincere man who belongs in an earlier era of cinema. Though a gal pal gave him a ride to the Go South premiere and found him very pleasantly forthcoming.

I think this comment from Chuck sets his tone. I'd emailed him our recording of "Midget's" to ask for his permission to post it for free sharing, and he responded, "Thanks for taking time out of your one and only life to give my song your attention."
 
-- Chris King

***

FREE SONG

"Midget's"
(Chuck Reinhart)

Performed by Three Fried Men
Nick Barbieri: vocals, drums, guitar, keyboard
Mark Buckheit: lap steel, guitar
David Melson: bass, guitars, organ

Produced by Chris King for Confluence City
Recorded by Nick Barbieri and David Melson in St. Louis, MO
Mixed by Meghan Gohil at Hollywood Recording Studio in Los Angeles, CA
Mastered by Elijah "LIJ" Shaw at the Toy Box in East Nashville, TN

(c) Chuck Reinhart

Feel free to download this performance from our Box account and freely share or post it with credit. The composition belongs to Chuck Reinhart. We could probably find him for you.

*

You can hear Chuck Reinhart's own performance of "Midget's" in Confluence City's Bootblogging series.

*

Previously on Songs from Home

"Had to End Sometime" by Bob Reuter


 
Chuck Reinhart (center)
as a Los Alamos sentinel at the zombie barber shave
(featuring Thom Fletcher and Joyce Pillow);
location still from the Poetry Scores movie
Go South for Animal Index




Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Hanging out with Orhan Veli, Kurt Vonnegut and Defne


Orhan Veli
 

Kurt Vonnegut



I have been invited to the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library to participate in the launch party of Issue No. 2 of its new(ish) literary journal So It Goes. The call was for funny work, befitting a namesake library for a hilarious writer, and the editor took from me a funny poem about poverty by the modern Turkish poet Orhan Veli, translated into English by Defne Halman and myself. I am hoping I can drag my family to Indianapolis so I can play esteemed Turkish co-translator for a day.

This invitation reminded me I had never properly celebrated all of the work Defne and I had in the inaugural issue of So It Goes, themed after war and armistice, befitting a namesake library for a  writer of war and peace. So here it goes.

The editors published not one, not two, not three, not four, but five Orhan Veli poems that the Turkish actress Defne Halman and I translated in New York City punk rock dives thirteen years ago. The main editor, J.T. Whitehead, told me the five poems happened to fit his five mental divisions for all the work they published in that volume. So it goes. And here are those five poems.


***


GONE TO WAR

Blonde boy gone to war!
Come back as beautiful as you are
The smell of sea on your lips
Salt on your eyelashes
Blonde boy gone to war!


– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King



*


 FOR THIS COUNTRY


What didn't we do for this country!
Some of us died
Some gave speeches


– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King



*


LIKE US


I wonder
When a tank dreams
Does it have desires
And what does an airplane think
When it's on its own?

Do gas masks enjoy
Singing songs in unison
In the moonlight?

And don't rifles even have as much compassion
As us humans?


 – By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King



*


CARNATION


You're right
Probably the death of 10,000 people in Warsaw
Is not as nice
As the art of exaggeration
And a military regiment
Isn't like a carnation
"Coming from a lover's lips"


– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King



*

GANGSTER
(Hitler Will Surrender Himself to Literature)


I wrote poems all these years
What did I find?
I'll be a bandit from now on

Let those guys who waylay you
On mountain roads know
There's no more work for them

I'm eating their lunch now
Let them know
There's a vacancy

In the literary trade


– By Orhan Veli
Translated from the Turkish by Defne Halman and Chris King



***

Looking only at the authors published on pages adjacent to one of these poems, this placed Orhan Veli and our voices immediately beside Marge Piercy, Robert Bly and Vonnegut himself. That was cool.

I also was humbled and honored to have one of my own poems published in the inaugural edition of this literary journal connected to the great, hilarious, compassionate Kurt Vonnegut.


***


WHORE’S HONOR


I beg your pardon, but how
can you honor the soldier and not the whore,
sailors and not streetwalkers,
the brave men fallen dead in battle and not
the courageous women whose
dirty duty and detail it is to blow
off soldiers’ heads and offer
to sailors the only port that feels like home?


– By Chris King



***

That's also my Veteran's Day poem, by the way -- soon to be translated into Russian by Kanat Omar. who is taking back to Kazakhstan one of my author copies of Issue No. 1.





So It Goes and Kurt Vonnegut's own books may be purchased at the online gift shop for the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.




My co-translator Defne Halman, still doing the punk rock protest thing, in The Guardian.



Saturday, June 29, 2013

Bootblogging #23: Six by Lydia's Trumpet


This morning Randall Roberts was musing that he wanted to share some music by Lydia's Trumpet, one of St. Louis' lost chamber pop bands, before anyone thought to name that quirky, at times precious, genre. Randall is one of our local music scenesters done good - he writes about music for the Los Angeles Times - so I wanted to hook him up.

Lydia's Trumpet - led by songwriter and chord strummer Ray Kirsch - was quirky, at times precious, clever but never smarmy, and at times unapologetically rhapsodic. Ray was not afraid to reach for the huge themes and statements, like interstellar distances, the origin and applications of petroleum, and wanting to make it with your girlfriend's mom.

Ray was very warm and likeable as a person, and he made friends with the best rock and pop musicians in the St. Louis scene of the late '80s and early '90s, who all played together in The Lettuceheads.

His friends did that ace rock musician thing where they all played secondary or tertiary instruments to back Ray up, so Lettucehead frontman Mike Burgett was Lydia's Trumpet's nervy drummer, and the best piano and keys player in town, ever (Carl Pandolfi), played bass. I seem to hear Jon Ferber singing, but can't picture him playing an instrument behind Ray.

Tim McAvin, not a Lettucehead, played his typical instrument (then) of electric guitar, but he had this magical way of standing there on stage absolutely puzzled by what he was playing or singing - because they all sang, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip dripping away around Ray. I remember Carl talking about Ray's songs being like a child's drawings, both erratic and beautifully simple, with an innocence the accomplished musicians who played them tried very carefully to protect.

To my knowledge, Lydia's Trumpet made a cassette, Catalpa, a CD, Marmalade, and a 7 inch on Faye Records, Copernicus. I've kept up with most of these guys, and Burgett at some point made me a CD of the Catalpa songs that now survive in my collection only on a compilation I made of Catalpa and my favorite songs from Marmalade. My copy of Copernicus seems not to have survived one of my bouts of between-homelessness as a traveling rock musician.

The last time I saw Ray, I was going over some co-translations of Turkish poetry I was working on at the time, and after milking me for information about the project - he left the conversation equipped to write a chamber pop story song about Orhan Veli and Istanbul - he told me, "You're always doing something that seems hard to do." Then he left St. Louis to learn how to draw maps in Minneapolis. I've not heard of him for many years.

These are my six favorite songs from Catalpa.

mp3s

from Catalpa
Lydia's Trumpet

"Rocket to Mars"
(Ray Kirsch)

"93 Million"
(Ray Kirsch)

"Iowa"
(Ray Kirsch)

"Dripping"
(Ray Kirsch)

"The Girl with Indefinite Hair"
(Ray Kirsch)

"Half"
(Ray Kirsch)

The song titles are all best guesses, since I am working from my own naked mix CD, and I'll be happy to make corrections.

The songs belong to Ray and the performances to the band, so please enjoy and share them freely but make no commercial use of them. I do not let Blogger sell ads for this blog.

More in this series

Bootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging  #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost
Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos
Bootblogging #22: Five by Bob Reuter

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Journey through journalism & terror with Jihad



I walked out of the office on Monday afternoon to blow a hole in my stomach with a bag of jalapeno potato chips, and when I got back to work the television set was on and everyone was watching a public emergency. Bombs had been set off at the finish line to the Boston Marathon.

I work in journalism -- local community journalism in St. Louis -- so this was not my problem, professionally speaking, and I have a lot of problems to solve every week as managing editor of a high-performing newspaper owned by a high-expectation publisher. So I went back to work and tried hard not too think too hard about what was happening in Boston.

It didn't work. I kept paying attention to the bad news. And I was really sick that night. I was sick from eating jalapeno potato chips, sick from the Boston Marathon getting bombed, sick from people getting killed and maimed at a positive public event in a beautiful city. And I was sick from everybody I know saying the same two or three things over and over and over and over and over and over and over on the social media I follow, on and off, all day, out of habit and professional necessity.

I was sick that this happened in Boston. I left home in Granite City, Illinois in 1984 at age 18 for U.S. Navy bootcamp in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and after bootcamp I reported to the NROTC Unit at Boston University. Boston was my first town that was not my hometown, the first town that felt completely mine. I still love it fiercely and mentally compare it to every place I visit. I tend to talk more about other places, the way we'll talk more about our interesting friends than we do about the siblings we come to take for granted, but that is my city that got bombed.

With our small staff charging through the usual assortment of challenges, we put out another newspaper on Thursday. It was full, as usual, of positive local community news -- personally my favorite kind of journalism, though I have reported for a major metro daily (The New York Times) and reviewed books for a gloomy radical weekly (The Nation). I have come to the conclusion that bad news will find people, or they will go looking for it fearfully, but what people need served to them is good positive news.

I tried hard not to think too hard about what was going on in Boston. The bad news always finds me without any effort on my part. But Boston is my city, so in fact I kept poring over national news sources when I wasn't working on the next week's paper, or mentoring a journalist who came to St. Louis for a few days to study how I manage a weekly newspaper, or going to my band rehearsal, or taking care of family errands.

I got up in the middle of the night on Thursday, which is to say very early Friday morning. There was no good reason for me to be awake. I usually sleep soundly through to the morning (unless I have eaten a bag of jalapeno potato chips, but that was Monday). I drifted to my laptop in the dark and looked for bad news in Boston. I quickly saw the shit had hit the fan in Watertown.

The journalist's instinct of finding the most direct source kicked in, so soon I was following a Reddit post where someone was reporting on the local police scanner and on a number of Twitter users who happened to live in the neighborhood where the shit was hitting the fan. From Reddit I found links to the Boston police scanner and Twitter reporters, and very quickly I left behind the traditional bad news media. The professional reporters seemed to be waiting for official announcements at Arsenal Mall, whereas I was getting raw reports from the front.

Alongside those raw reports, I was also getting bug-eyed speculation. None of the bug-eyed speculation was any more far-fetched than the official report that would emerge later in the early morning. In my sleep deprivation I came to believe one preposterous theory about the identity of the younger bomber. And while my experience as a journalist (who has made every possible mistake as a reporter) kept me from posting my new received opinion publicly, I did wake up my spouse and told her the news I thought she would be hearing in the morning.

When I woke back up, I was reminded why people follow the bad news. It's so full of surprises. The culprits were not the kid the Reddit crowd had focused on but a 19 year-old-wrestler from Cambridge and his 20-something big brother, a Golden Gloves boxer, both from Chechnya by way of Kyrgyzstan. None of us saw that one coming. The nerds on Reddit weren't going there. Most of the cops talking logistics on the Boston scanner probably couldn't find Chechnya or Kyrgyzstan on a map.

The other shocker was that the younger bomber -- known on Reddit the night before as "White Hat," after the color of the ballcap he was wearing backwards when he bombed Boston -- had escaped. When I went to sleep, according to the raw reports from the front, it seemed like a whole lot of armed and armored cops had the kid cornered with his bigger and older accomplice dead. How the hell did he get away?

Though I certainly was not rooting for this kid, far from it, I had to admire his pluck and luck in the dark of the night. He was a cold-blooded killer and a coward of a covert bomber, but he also outran a mob of the much better armed and longer arm of the law. America has traditions of respect for the outlaw and the vigilante. However little he deserved our respect, White Hat seemed to have escaped into those traditions.

I was thinking about these things as I picked up the young journalist who came to St. Louis to study my moves. His name happens to be Jihad Hassan Muhammad. I know, it comes across as a bit much in this age of terror with the evil Other being a Moslem jihadist, but that's the man's chosen name. Jihad is a very devout convert to Islam, and he holds very dear to his heart the devout Muslim principal of jihad, of spiritual struggle with the forces of darkness within us, and the Prophet Muhammad was the Messenger of the faith that saved his soul.

That day, Friday, I made sure Jihad learned from other people at our paper with more to teach him, our publisher Donald M. Suggs and web editor Kenya Vaughn. After all, I had only been teaching him Suggs' model of community journalism, and as a good journalist he needed to hear from the direct source in Suggs himself. And while I manage the challenging operations of a still-thriving print platform, Kenya deals with what people are really reading in the increasingly online real world.

I still had lots of copy to chop and photos to track down if we were to keep moving toward our next deadline, but I kept an eye on Boston. The bad news reports were starting to sound like a not very believable movie. Boston was basically under martial law so that authorities could find one 19-year-old-kid who had escaped on foot. I'm not sure I could have suggested a better idea, given the stakes, but still I was ashamed for our country. Our freedom seemed so fragile. A teenager with a crockpot bomb can paralyze an entire city and put it under temporary martial law.

I bid goodbye to Jihad, whose fiancee was coming to visit, then went to the Missouri History Museum to participate in a fiction reading. When I arrived at the museum, I told one of the other readers, my friend Virvus Jones, that I had not been able to promote our event all week. It just didn't seem important enough, with everything else that was going on. He agreed. He said it had been hard to tear himself away from news coverage to come do the reading.

"Now they got him trapped in his boat," Virvus said.

What?

This was the first I had heard about the teenage terrorist crawling into someone's drydocked boat in the back yard and being discovered there. Virvus had seen the bad news more recently than I had. I more or less raced through our reading without paying much attention to any of it, and then rushed home to read up on the bad news. That's when I learned about the authorities admitting defeat and lifting martial law with a public pronouncement, which freed some yacht club guy in Watertown to step outside for a cigarette. Then he saw the tarp ripped on his pleasure craft, peeked inside and saw the bloody kid hiding there.

This struck me as another gruesome American irony, like the bad man being a kid in a white hat and an entire city going under martial law because of one teenager who escaped on foot. The Boston bombers, if they have identified the right people, are immigrants, and for most of our history immigrants came here on boats. Of course, all of this nightmare was going down in the cradle of the American Revolution, in the old New England founded by settlers who came by sea on ships. And now this little immigrant crock pot bomber was coming to the end of his journey in a boat in a backyard in Watertown.

The American Dream has turned into a really crummy nightmare -- a nightmare in which I wake from sleep in the middle of the night and sit up all morning listening to a police scanner in Boston, when I am supposed to be gathering and distributing good news in St. Louis.


Tuesday, April 16, 2013

SCHMOOZE LUNCH MEMO, Midtown Manhattan, Mid-November 2001



I was living in New York on September 11, 2001, and still two months later when I attended a schmooze lunch in Midtown Manhattan. It was a time when the grisliest speculation about terrorism and death was mixed up at all times with everything else. I tried to capture this feeling in a disoriented little poem. It's going to be like this in Boston for awhile. Very sorry about that.

*

SCHMOOZE LUNCH MEMO
Midtown Manhattan
Mid-November 2001

 
The rusty hair, the big bait,
it’s the only Rembrandt still for sale, you know,
kudos on your ad deal, your
people are so smart! professional bug blue
eyes, fidgety, fancy room,
shortcomings of my Haitian tailor, relief
from tattoos, sequined choker

of motorcycle mama shredding extra
bread into her vagrant pursed
lips and declining cleavage in a thermal
shirt – Amsterdam! only Old
Master! cell phone talk, table to table,
talking up his talk – no match
for the latest from the price-fixing trial – did you
feel sorry for him? I did,
until I saw him, father kindness, the kind
you can’t tell from predation
until he doesn’t try to take you home – I

think a lot of the bodies
are pulverized; I think some of them are parts.


-- Chris King

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Henry Miller hated, hated, hated St. Louis: 'a foul, stinking corpse'



For whatever reason, I have been slow to read most of the American counter-cultural classics. I only got started on Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934) this winter when my friend Lola van Ella scored it for interactive burlesque, giving me homework to do.

I've not been able to finish that book (there's more in Tropic of Cancer about being famished in Paris than anything sexy), but it did make me pull down from my shelf a later and lesser-known work by Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). I've had a battered Panther Books paperback in my collection for many years without even flirting with reading it.

Yesterday I had four young girls in my care on roller skates at a roller rink, which freed me to sit up in what might generously be called the lobby and do some pleasure reading. And I came across some fascinating stuff in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. The book is basically a venomous anti-American travelogue, Steinbeck's Travels with Charley except where the sidekick is not a dog but a fellow jaded expatriate who fled Paris as Hitler's war was hitting there. Miller and his road buddy miss Paris and France so hard they'd almost rather be back there ducking air raids than driving from state to state on American highways that make Miller see blood red.

He hates just about everything and every place about his native country, but saves special scathing scorn for my city, St. Louis, Missouri, which he sees for the first time in the early 1940s. Henry Miller writes of "the tomb of St. Louis which is called a city, but which is a foul, stinking corpse rising up from the plains like an advertisement of Albrecht Durer's 'Melancholia'."

The St. Louis of my experience (1985 to present, with interruptions) is very beloved by architects and architectural aficionados (or, as I like to call them when trying to be a rascal, the building huggers). So it really shocked me that Henry Miller found our city to be an architectural monstrosity:

".. this great American city creates the impression that architecture itself has gone mad. The true morbidity of the American soul finds its outlet here. Its hideousness is not only appalling but suffocating. The houses seem to have been decorated with rust, blood, tears, sweat, bile, rheum, and elephant dung."

This makes me want to get out my copy of Bill Streeter's St. Louis documentary Brick by Chance and Fortune to see if he uncovered this quote. If not, maybe it can be included in a second edition, because that sure sounds like an evil-eyed description of our beloved brick houses.

I'll also have to thank Lola for scoring this sourpuss' classic novel for interactive burlesque: for summoning Henry Miller's spirit back to a place he couldn't leave fast enough: "One can imagine the life which goes on there - something a la Theodore Dreiser at his worst. Nothing can terrify me more than the thought of being doomed to spend the rest of my days in such a place."

Love you back, Henry Miller!

Post-Script.

There is hope, if Lola conjured Henry Miller's spirit to her interactive burlesque score of Tropic of Cancer, that the author would have taken a more charitable view of St. Louis in 2013, roughly seventy years after his first and presumably only visit to our river city. For in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare Miller begrudgingly praises another Mississippi River city, New Orleans. N'arlins evokes his beloved Paris, of course, but there is more to it: "here at last on this bleak continent," Miller writes of New Orleans, "the sensual pleasures assume the importance which they deserve." Certainly, the same can be said of St. Louis any time Lola is running the show!

***

The image is Albrecht Durer's 'Melancholia'.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

T.D. El-Amin, Virvus Jones, Chris King read from novels at History Museum



Three St. Louis novelists (all better known for other things) will read excerpts from their work 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 19 in the Lee Auditorium at the Missouri History Museum: T.D. El-Amin, Virvus Jones and Chris King.

The reading is free and open to the public and should last a little over an hour. It will be followed by an afterparty at The Royale public house, 3132 S. Kingshighway.

TD El-Amin will read from his newly published novel, Mia Farone: Lost and Turned Out. A daughter of Italian and African-American parents, the heroine is uprooted from her native Tivoli to the streets of St. Louis, where she falls in with a hustler ten years her senior. The novel tastefully expresses intimacy and sexuality while tactfully combining suspense and intrigue. El-Amin will sell and sign copies of his novel at the reading and afterparty.

Virvus Jones will read from his unpublished novel The Stalking Horse. This autobiographical novel follows a streetwise young black man from North St. Louis as he outgrows his parochial environment and begins to ask questions of the wider world as the Civil Rights Movement explodes around him. It veers in style from the folkloric intimacy of Zora Neale Hurston to the hard, plain speaking of Richard Wright.

Chris King will read from his unpublished novel Big, Black & Good. His novel follows the disintegration of a reality TV show about an obese black rapper named Big Carb. The show's casting call is for a rapper who is "big, black and good," but the young man from North St. Louis who wins the competitive audition turns out to be a little better -- at heart -- than his blaxploitative coproducers bargained for.

***


TD El-Amin is a former host of the radio program Touching Base with TD and former Missouri state representative. A U.S. Navy veteran, he joined the service in the late 1980s expecting that the world travel would widen his perspective as a writer. Mia Farone: Lost and Turned Out is his first book.



Virvus Jones most recently managed the successful campaign of his daughter Tishaura O. Jones for St. Louis Treasurer. He is a former Comptroller, Assessor and Alderman of St. Louis. He was cofounder of the Political EYE column in The St. Louis American.




Chris King is a producer, filmmaker, musician and journalist. He is creative director of Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media, and managing editor of The St. Louis American. His most recent book is a chapbook of poetry, Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints, 2012).

For more information, email Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com.